RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK – IBM has closed its $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, the tech giant announced Tuesday morning.

IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat, which was announced last October, is the biggest in the tech giant’s history. It also ranks as the second largest tech merger to date, trailing only Dell’s $67 billion buy of EMC four years ago.

The deal comes as IBM, while maintaining a large campus and several thousand employees in RTP, is not the Triangle behemoth it was earlier this decade. As Red Hat’s workforce grew steadily over the years to more than 13,000 the Triangle campus shrank to well under 10,000. Still, the impact on the Triangle will no doubt be huge as thousands of Red Hat workers begin receive paychecks from a new boss as well as cash -$190 for every share they own.

The deal also surpasses the previous largest corporate merger in North Carolina history – Duke Energy’s $30 billion-plus deal (including debt) for Progress Energy in 2012.

“Businesses are starting the next chapter of their digital reinventions, modernizing infrastructure and moving mission-critical workloads across private clouds and multiple clouds from multiple vendors,” said Ginni Rometty, IBM chairman, president and CEO.